MAGUY MARIN COMPANY

MAGUY MARIN

Searching
until this very moment, with a constituent part, a company.

An attempt to
work together that never ceases to be deeply
moving. And being able to earn a living from
it, by pure will power, with numerous co-workers. By dint of the confidence of
the Créteil's Maison de la Culture,
directed by Jean Morlock (from 1981 till 1990) ; but also with the help of enduring public aid.

1990, the
company became the Centre chorégraphique national de Créteil et du Val-de-Marne, diligently continuing its artistic work
and intensive international touring.

1998,
a new site, a new administrative structure. A new territory for a new Centre
chorégraphique national at Rillieux-la-Pape, in
the Velette neighborhood. The need to
once again invest public space. To celebrate the wealth of our difference and
the pleasure of the living act of
artistic creation. Building support to make possible what cannot be done alone. Collaboration between communities
(Rillieux-la-Pape, Bron until 2006,
Décines until 2006, Villefranche-sur-Saône until 2000 and Villeurbanne until
2003) and reciprocal public aid (Ministry of Culture, Region Rhone-Alps,
General Council of the Rhone).

Then, in 2006, a new venue is built for the CCN in Rillieux-la-Pape The new place must now be dwelled in and co-dwelled in: a people's laboratory which is the essence of the performing arts meant for the gaze of the polis so as to induce a public poetic manifesto.

Today
the work continues in a plurality of territories - from the Studio, to the
Velette neighborhood, to partnering
towns, to as far away as cities of other countries.

Work
intertwining new works, performances (the 600 shows of May B has been performed
in Paris - Quartiers d'été in august 09), and multiform activities where
artistic exigency opens paths that go
beyond the immediate convivial desire for being together.

2011 is the year of a remodelling of the framework in which the company's reflection and achievements unfold. After the intensity of the Rillieux-la-Pape years, the need for a new phase is felt, coming from an anchoring in the city of Toulouse whose hospitality will encourage to go on opening the immaterial space of a relentlessly resilient togetherness.

Special price of the jury of Syndicat de la critique 2006 & Bessie Award 2008

It is not a question of doing the
impossible but of exhausting the possible.

The world is complex. That's what they
say. We never stop saying it. We never stop believing it. But this complexity
entrenches us. Pushing us to believe in our own impotence.

Nevertheless, it's simple, we're still
here, alive. Active, regardless of everything. Ceaselessly testing what is
possible for us (small or large).

That's where we are. Inventorying what is
possible. Toying with the possible without achieving it. Going to the
exhaustion of possibilities. An exhaustion that renounces any order of
preference and any organization of purpose or meaning. We don't prefer one over
the other. We don't achieve any more, even though we continue to accomplish.

And it's because we won't stop wanting to
live, not only be born, to experiment, not only observe, that we extricate
ourselves from the complexity. So that the complexity becomes multiplicity. So
that the world is no longer complex, but multiple - plural.

A multiplicity where the exhaustion of
that which is possible composes. Gives rhythm. A multiplicity filled with
uninterrupted movements, with accelerating, with releasing. Constant
alterations which give us the joy of the unpredictable. The joy of giving
ourselves the potential to act.

The joy of living our capabilities for
transformation. We're not made once and forever. We don't know what a life - or
a body - can do or be? We don't know what postures and positions will spread
from our interferences (external and internal)? Positions, postures, accidents,
dissonances, steps and paths, approaches, exhaustive positions setting off in
diverse directions.

Unstable construction, where the
encountered singularity extends itself into the proximity of another. A
construction step by step.

A construction from the center of things.

And from the center, we will act. A piece
without foreknowledge, without exteriority.

Where the being-here of each individual will
bring forth a poetics of being with the world. A state of aliveness where the
irreducible intersubstance and positioning in perpetual movement are in play.
And so, we shall be here in shared time, shared space, shared environment. Investigating
- eight artists together - that which links things.

Catching a glimpse of the porosities. And
not personalities, merely anecdotal. Again stating the necessity of addressing
others, of the appeal of the indefinite.

"Others" as the "possible worlds" to
which movements and objects confer an always variable reality. Others who have
no other reality than that which their voice gives them in their possible
world, and who are in themselves "stories" and "histories".

NOCTURNES

Premiere on September 19, 2012 at Villeurbanne (France)

Conceptionand realisation: Maguy Marin and Denis Mariotte

Technical direction and lights : Alexandre Béneteaud

Props : Louise Gros

Costumes : Nelly Geyres with Raphaël Lo Bello

Sound : Antoine Garry

Stage manager : Daniel Mariotte

Software development : Philippe Montémont

Trainee technical and lights : Charlie Aubry

Trainee props : Louise Mariotte

Piece for 6 performers

Maguy
Marin collaborates with musician and composer Denis Mariotte once again.
Together, they created a choreography which confronts such essential themes as
the body, history and the power of images. Although her work has become a
classic of contemporary dance, Maguy Marin once again leaps into the unknown.

MAY B

Premiere the 4th November 1981 at the Théâtre Municipal d'Angers

Choreography : Maguy Marin

Costumes : Louise Marin

Original music : Franz Schubert, Gilles de Binche,
Gavin Bryars

Lights : Maguy Marin company

Duration : 90 minutes

Piece for 10 dancers

"This piece based on the writings of Samuel
Beckett, whose work contradicts in its theatrical movement and atmosphere the
physical and aesthetic performance of a dancer, has enabled us to lay the
grounds for a secret decyphering of our most intimate, hidden and ignored
gestures. To succeed in unveiling
the tiny or spectacular gestures of the many unnoticeable and unconspicious
lives in which waiting and "not quit still" stillness create a void,
a huge nothingness, a silent space filled with the hesitations. When Beckett's
characters yearn for stillness, they cannot help moving; be it a little or a
lot, they move. In this essentially
theatrical work, the point, for us, was less to develop words and speech than
blown-up form of movement, thus seeking the meeting point between movement
applied to thea- ter on the one hand, and dance and choreographic language on
the other." Maguy Marin

"
(...) She is blessed with a sense of fantasy and of the absurd - and in Samuel
Beckett's plays, she has found a perfect focus for meditating upon life's
absurdities. Like Beckett, she works with archetypal characters - his, in fact
- and using universals, makes the human condition look very specific. The 10 dancers onstage
are a composite of Beckett's characters, - their faces plastered with gray
chalk that flies out as they move. Clad in illfitting night clothes, they
trudge their alienated way in unison - remarkably precise in every movement -
toward self-discovery. Sex is what they discover early on in a manic twitching
sequence, but we also see them register an increasing range of emotions -
hostility, fear and tenderness. (...)"

Rhythm
is form whenever it is embodied in what is moving, movable, fluid, [...]. It is
the improvised, transient, modifiable form. Emile
Benveniste *.

In
that sense human life can be apprehended as a
ceaselessly mutating form, "a walking path" **, a succession of
instants that serve as the pulsation of a rhythm on a larger scale, the rhythm
of a life- time. From one instant to the next, that
rhythmicity is at once what is closest to us and yet remains the most unknown:
every one of our gestures -gait, speech, reflexes- delineates rhythmic patterns
composed of a sequence of instants.

Gradually,
what we experience blends in step by step with what we have experienced
earlier, already echoing, midway between memory and expectation, what we will
experience at a later stage. The prospective odds, so plentiful at birth,
narrow down progressively until they define the unique existence of a specific
being, a rhythm that bespeaks one unique means of experiencing time. The
display of alternatively slow or fast flows, of durations, starts, pauses,
stresses, intensities, surges, pitches, tempi, permeates the present of a
sensible experience marked by every past event and yet si- multaneously
anticipating the sound of every event in time to come. As
a result the manifold rhythms, the manifold fluencies emerge, those instants
that constitute the many parts of the compass of a particular human life among
other equally particular human lives; they all coexist within the whole compass
of human generations and unite into pure musicality.